He did not enroll in college due to weak eyes, but he attended lectures at Yale University on and off and became an honorary member of the class of 1847. He also studied engineering. In 1844 Olmsted He decided to become a farmer and, after gaining practical experience, settled on Staten Island, where he worked on a farm until 1854. In 1859 he married Mary Cleveland Perkins Olmsted, his brother’s widow; the couple had two children.
In 1851 he visited Andrew Jackson Downing, who along with others, had conceived the idea of creating a large park in New York City. Before realizing his dream, Downing died. Olmsted he kept the idea alive and in 1857 was appointed superintendent of what would become Central Park. He and Calvert Vaux won the design competition for the park, and in 1858 Olmsted he was appointed chief architect of Central Park. During the Civil War, he resigned his appointment due to political differences and in 1863 accepted the superintendency of the Fremont Mariposa mining properties in California.
When Olmsted returned to New York in 1865, he and Vaux were reappointed as Central Park landscape architects. Signature Olmstead became one of the largest landscape architectural firms in the United States. His projects included the Prospect Park in Brooklyn (1865); the town of Riverside, near Chicago (1868); Mount Royal Park in Montreal (1873-1881); the Capitol grounds in Washington, DC (1874-1885); the Boston park system (1875-1895); Stanford University, Palo Alto, California (1886 to 1889) .; and wl Jackson Park in Chicago (1895). the most important late work of Olmsted was the design for the Columbian Universal Exhibition, Chicago (1890-1893).
Restless by nature, Olmsted He traveled frequently and often published his diaries and conversations. Wrote “Roads and Conversations of an American Farmer in England“(1852),”A trip along the coastline of the Slave States“(1856),”A trip through Texas“(1857), and”A trip in the back country“(1860).
Always interested in publishing, he and CS Sargent founded the magazine Garden and Forest. Olmsted encouraged further planning parks by publishing “Public parks and the expansion of towns“(1871) and”A consideration about the founding value of a public park “(1881).
He died on August 28, 1903, having witnessed the enthusiastic development in American cities of public park systems.